man & nature # 40 ~ time in a bottle
Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 12:23PM 
Let the sun shine in • click to embiggenOne thing about pictures that rings very true to me regarding the notion of time goes like this:
Every picture, except at the exact nano-second it is created, immediately becomes a thing of the past. But, in addition to a picture's life as a thing of past in and of itself, every picture also hints at another past which, of course, is the life of the referent before the picture was created.
The picture nevertheless gives evidence / testament to the once present state of the referent and in doing so gives it a permanent state of being in the present. But, even as one views that past present (in whatever present one may be living), the awareness of both the past and the present in the picture implies future possibilities.
I am discovering, more and more, that this somewhat weird time continuum warp - time spinning over and over upon itself in a bottle (the bottle, of course, being the vessel of the picture), is what I love most about the medium. Every good photograph that I encounter nearly overwhelms me its virtually overlapping sense of past, present, and future. I don't see the picture only as a discrete moment in time. A good picture must be able to transport me to a place in the past - life before the picture was created, link me to the present in a commanding way, and take me into a revelry of future possibilities.
And, as I am again realizing, the photographer has taken me on this time warp dance by touching upon a truth that is connected to the real. And nothing, I repeat, nothing in the visual arts makes a connection to the real better than the medium of photography.
Anyone understand?
Reader Comments (5)
I understand. I find it amusing when photographers praise a photo as "timeless." What does that mean? They've successfully removed one of the most important contexts.
So much of "good photography" nowadays is devoid of any real connection of the object in the photo to that outside the frame. It's not even the THING itself, but the representation of that thing. And only that THING. You can slap a thick, black border around it, put a nice business buzzword below it and make people feel good. But beyond turning the THING into a commodity, it ain't doing much.
"Every good photograph that I encounter nearly overwhelms me its virtually overlapping sense of past, present, and future."
portraits too? not candid or narrative portrait photography...but something more along the lines of Mapplethorpe?
Love today's post - a very interesting line of thought. Could you kindly comment on the sense of past, present and future with respect to abstract photography?
Wow, that's powerful! I love that oblique line of the tree that continues in the flowers and the book. I love the fact that it is a children's book (though I have not read it and didn't know it up to now), and I love the form of the diptychon. Hmm ... I make one or the other square recently, I have not tried a diptychon more than once, and then it were two square aspects of the same image, but I feel that I'll explore that route some time.
Ted Byrne once referred me to Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art", and though I don't actively use what I've learned from it, I very much appreciate the enormous story-telling power that lies in sequence and simultaneity. Seeing your images, I don't see the obvious story, the one that can't be missed. It's more subtle, ambivalent, much more open, but it is far from random nevertheless. So: how do you combine? When do you do it and what are your criteria? Is there a personal story? Do you follow intuition? Is there a hidden concept? Are they part of a greater project?
I think I understand what you mean and I believe you're not alone, quite rightly so, as what you say makes sense. But please allow me to question the necessity for an image to include a concept of time in order to be enjoyed or appreciated. Now while I rarely think in terms of time (doing a physics major kind of ruined that for me) I would venture to say that an image can only transport you back in time if you have the appropriate memory to go with it. Showing an image of Paris in 1940 to a native of Papua New Guinea would not ellicit any sense of time warp though it may quite possibly captivate the viewer. I suppose that what I am saying is that I do not see time as being a necessary context of a photograph let alone an important one. Afterall would it not be fair to say that the two photographs here are timeless (in the sense that they do not evoke a sense of time) to anyone but the photographer and anyone directly connected to them?
Also I would suggest that where visual arts are concerned, movies connect us to the real at least as well as photography. (Granted movies are nothing more than many photographs put one after the other.) Similarly I know dancers who would argue that their art form connects them to the real more than anything else. And I daresay some musicians would feel the same about music. Perhaps it is not art itself that connects us to the real but rather our ability to appreciate a particular art form that allows us to recognise the connection that is always there.
Thanks Mark for writing such an evocative topic and for your inpirational images.